This is a mini-blog. I'm working to find a compromise between a tweet and a lengthy essay. I find it difficult to complete longer documents because of an obsession with perfection. So this little experiment is to see if I can create a blog of mini articles. Herein I will talk about many technical things generally related to software development and Agile practices.

28 July 2017

Side Effects

Side Effects are an often over looked consideration when coding. A side-effect occurs when a function modifies the state of something outside of its own scope. That is, it changes the value of a global, static, or argument. Functions should ideally not do this.However, here is a conundrum, how do you modify the state of they system otherwise? For example, if your code is updating the value of a transfer object, how do change its value since it is technically outside of your scope? One technique is to clone the input and modify that input. This prevents the side-effect of having modified the object passed in. In stead you are creating a new object as a copy of the object received and modifying it. If you do this consistently throughout the system there will be no side-effects. An approach like that has some powerful consequences. For one, in a multithreaded system there is no risk of two threads making concurrent modifications. Thats typically a good thing. Another benefit is that you don't have to worry about a function changing the state of its arguments, so as a caller you can rely on the state of the arguments being unchanged. This also allows you to make all of your objects immutable. Immutability providing you the assurance that an specific instances value/state has not changed. In the end, this will force you to be very concise in your method declarations however. Typically we don't return complicated structures, if we generally call a function we expect only one value/object back from it. This is also a pretty good design approach.